This spot in Chicago is the epitome of a more than $100 billion problem facing America

The CSX locomotives expel thousands of horsepower to
get the freight train moving.Sam
Rega

A freight train more than 10,000 feet long, hauling hundreds of
shipping containers, sits idle in residential Chicago. It's the
middle of the afternoon, and the CSX train is just parked there.
Waiting.

At this stretch of railroad, known as the 75th Street Corridor,
that scene plays out day after day. Freight trains spend hours
waiting for commuter and Amtrak trains to clear a single
intersection, blocking their path and preventing the delivery of
goods.

The corridor sits in an urban neighborhood southwest of downtown
Chicago. It's widely considered the worst choke point for rail
movement in the city, which is the busiest rail hub in the
nation. With hundreds of billions of dollars in goods traveling
through Chicago by rail every year, each minute those freight
trains are stalled, companies and consumers alike are losing
money or being forced to spend more for the goods those trains
haul.

Down the track from the stationary CSX train, a Metra commuter
train rumbles through the worst part of the corridor: Forest Hill
Junction, a six-track intersection shared by Amtrak, commuter,
and freight rail. A few minutes later, another Metra train rolls
through. Because these commuter trains run perpendicular to the
track the freight train uses — and almost always have the right
of way — the freight has to wait.

The cause of so many delays: the Forest Hill
Junction.Andrew
Stern

"It really is the Gordian knot of Chicago that has to be
untangled," Tom Livingston, a CSX vice president for government
affairs, told Business Insider. "It would be like two major
interstates meeting each other at a four-way stop sign."

After a half hour or so, a whistle rings out. The freight train
shudders and groans as the conductor nudges it into motion.
Finally, slowly, it's back on its way, moving goods through the
city.

"It really is impactful on the entire nation in terms of moving
traffic through," Livingston said. "You have freight moving at
every point on the compass, and a lot of it."

'The Super Bowl of freight rail'

This might not sound like a huge problem — most people probably
prefer their commutes take precedence over freight rail
movements.

The mess of an intersection, however, takes on outsized
importance given its location.

Chicago is the rail capital of the country. About 40% of the
ton-miles (freight tonnage multiplied by distance traveled) that
freight travels in this country goes by rail, and nearly
one-third of that goes through Chicago.

"There's no other mode of transportation where a third of
something goes anywhere," Livingston said. "You can do everything
right everywhere else, from sea to shining sea, on our network,
and Chicago is the goal line. And you can't fumble on the goal
line."

Freight rail is divided into three classifications, with Class I
being the largest and including national operators like CSX and
Union Pacific. Chicago is the only place in the country where six
of the seven Class I operators interconnect. That's why
Livingston refers to the city as "the Super Bowl of freight
rail."

The overlap, while vital, leads to massive congestion and costly
delays.

An
Amtrak study of the Chicago rail problem found that a train
shipment spends an average of 30 hours
traversing the Chicago region. To put that into context, freight
often takes 48 hours to get from Los Angeles to Chicago.

CSX's freight train stretches into the distance as it
traverses the Forest Hill Junction.Andrew Stern

In real, economic terms, the Chicago rail hub could potentially
affect somewhere between $657 billion and $799
billion annually, according to the same Amtrak study.
That figure, however, has been disputed by "an economist who once
served as a lead planner for the Chicago region." The study isn't
"junk, but that $800 billion number is just absurd," he said,
according to
Railway Age.

Even if that number is overblown, freight rail did move
1.7 billion tons of freight valued at
$427 billion in 2010, the last year for which
data was available. Given that almost one-third of that
travels through Chicago, the economic effects of delays are huge.

And these aren't just abstract costs. Rail ships many of the bulk
products and household goods consumers rely on: car parts, grain,
natural gas, UPS packages, you name it. When rail shipments are
held up, those costs can be passed to the consumer.

Englewood Junction, on the south side of Chicago
near I-94 and 63rd Street, used to be the worst choke point
in the region. So Create built a flyover
— basically an overpass that carries one train over another in a
different direction. The Englewood flyover separated 46 freight
trains, 78 Metra trains, and 14 Amtrak trains that pass through
daily and eliminated 7,500 annual hours of delays for commuters,
according to
Create.

A similar solution could unclog the 75th Street Corridor. The
proposed flyover would eliminate conflicts between 30 Metra
commuter trains and 35 freight trains every day. But the project
can't proceed unless Create secures the necessary funding.

A lack of investment in infrastructure projects like this one has
become all too common in the US. America spends far less a percentage of its
gross domestic product on infrastructure than many of its
economic rivals, and consumers everywhere can feel the effects of
that divestment. The 75th Street Corridor is a perfect example of
how that oversight harms the economy.

America's future competitiveness in a global economy depends on
its ability to move a tremendous amount of goods around the
country. If trains are stuck waiting for hours on end just to
move through Chicago, that harms not just the rail companies and
the city of Chicago, but the entire economy as well.